Chris Hedges Comments on the U.S. Security State and the DNC

Chris Hedges was recently on Glenn Greenwald's System Update offering a wide-ranging analysis of current events. I copied the following excerpts concerning the U.S. Security State and the disturbing transformation of the DNC:

G. Greenwald: Anyone covering foreign policy and covering wars as you did for so long, obviously has to deal with, in all sorts of ways, the U.S. security state, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and sort of how it influences a lot of these policies. There's no way to understand one without the other. After 9/11, we saw this series of whistleblowers from within the U.S. Security State, and people like William Binney, Thomas Drake, and, of course, culminating with Edward Snowden, all have the same grievance, namely, that the whole foundation of this secret part of our government that would act without democratic accountability and outside of any transparency would be the one taboo would ever be turning their power inward to manipulate the American population and domestic population. And a lot of that came forward primarily based on their grievance, that that was the thing that they thought would never happen. And they were seeing that more and more and more and more, that almost as much as these agencies were focused on foreign governments, they were focused on our domestic politics as well. I know there's been a lot of that since the creation of the U.S. Security State, but do you agree that that has gotten worse and more dire, more evident – the idea that the U.S. Security State now plays a bigger role than ever before in our domestic politics?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it's completely unaccountable and you can't control it. That's the problem. And Arnold Toynbee when he writes about the decline of the Empire, talks about these rogue intelligence, military complexes, institutions that essentially can no longer be regulated, can no longer be constrained. All of the people who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, you know, there should be accountability there. Not only is there no accountability, but the same people are leading us into the disasters in Ukraine and funneling weapons to sustain the genocide in Gaza. And that's very dangerous because, at the beginning of an empire, empires are very judicious, usually about the use of force. What characterizes declining dying empires is military adventurism, where they seek to gain a diminishing or a loss to Germany through a military fiasco. And I think we can start with Vietnam and go basically right through just one military debacle after another. What we've done in the Middle East is probably the greatest strategic blunder, you know, in American history.

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George Carlin Bit on Assassination, Etc.

I don't think of Donald Trump as a big advocate for peace and harmony, but he has spoken out against U.S. warmongering far more than Kamala Harris, who now has the endorsements of Dick Cheney and his minions.  If you are a candidate who speaks out against U.S. warmongering, you are threatening the  jobs of the U.S. military and U.S. security state employees. It also appears that you are risking your own life.

Assassination. You know what's interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry, but it's also interesting to notice who it is we assassinate. You ever notice who it is? Stop to think of who it is we kill. It's always people who've told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin, Luther King, Medgar Evers Malcolm X John Lennon, they all said, try to live together peacefully. Bam, right in the fucking head. Apparently, we're not ready for that. Yeah, that's difficult behavior for us.

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Minimal Media Coverage of Attempted Assassinations and The Dog the Didn’t Bark

If they were real journalists, the U.S. corporate media would be vigorously examining the many claims raised in this video (and many similar videos and posts on X (Twitter). It would be nonstop, 24/7. Similarly, if someone tried to shoot Kamala Harris, the "news" media would stop at NOTHING to find out exactly and precisely what happened, how it happened and why.

Too many things simply don't add up regarding the two recent attempts on Donald Trump's life, but revealing the facts might not be convenient for the big media corporations. Vigorously investigating how these two allegedly unfunded and unconnected "renegades" came so close to killing Donald Trump might even impugn the operations and intentions of the U.S. security state. It is stunning to watch "journalists" doing the bare minimum, repeatedly taking the attitude: Just move on . . . nothing to see here. They are working hard to normalize the fact that people sometimes try to kill a major candidate for president. This lack of interest, the failure or journalists to care about major stories, is as disturbing as the blatant censorship and government funded propaganda we've seen over the past five years.

For those who think all of the questions and suspicions of this young woman on TikTok are far-fetched, that the U.S. security state would never do the terrible things that it does to other countries to our own country, consider that the ubiquitous censorship, government propaganda (including the claim of Russian collusion), the abject disinterest of our corporate media and perhaps much much more might be the most recent manifestations of a 60+ year work in progress.

If you think that the constant state of war promoted by the U.S. is the only option, your brain has been broken by sophisticated U.S. government psy-ops. You can't simply make these serious concerns magically disappear by uttering "conspiracy theory" as though this phrase were one of Harry Potter's incantations.

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What is the Deep State?

What is the "Deep State"? No one exemplifies this reality more than Victoria Nuland. To understand and acknowledge the deep state is to recognize the primary tectonic plate of the US, the thing that drives our constant warmongering, our interference with the governance of other countries, our constance forceful confiscation of the natural recesses of other countries and the ubiquitous censorship that is preventing you for seeing all of this for what it is.

Jeffrey Sachs I think it's obvious there's basically one deep state party, and that is the party of Cheney Harris, Biden, Victoria Nuland,--my colleague at Columbia University now-- and Nuland is kind of the face of all of this, because she has been in every administration for the last 30 years. She was in the Clinton administration, wrecking our policies towards Russia in the 1990s. She was in the Bush Administration, Jr, with Cheney, wrecking our policies towards NATO enlargement. She was in then the Obama administration as Hillary's spokesperson first, and then making a coup in Ukraine in February 2014, not a Great move, started a war. Then she was Biden's Undersecretary of State. Now that's both parties. It's a colossal mess, and she's been Cheney's advisor. She's been Biden's adviser. Makes perfect sense ....

John Mearsheimer When we talk about the deep state, we're talking really about the administrative state. It's very important to understand that, starting in the late 19th, early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we developed--and this was true of all Western countries--a very powerful central state that could run the country, and over time, that state has grown in power. And since World War Two, the United States, as you all know, has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high level bureaucrats, middle level and low level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence community, you name it, and they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy. And the particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one that the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. And that's why we talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum, with regard to the two parties you could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions.

Jeffrey Sachs There's a very interesting interview of Putin in Figaro in 2017 and he says, I've dealt with three presidents now. They come into office with some ideas even. But then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties--and then he says, I wear red ties, but they wear blue ties--they come in and explain the way the world really is. And there go the ideas. And I think that's Putin's experience, that's our experience, that's my experience, which is that there's a deeply entrained foreign policy. It has been in place in my interpretation, for many decades, but arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on, because I was an advisor to Gorbachev and I was an advisor to Yeltsin, and so I saw early makings of this, though I didn't fully understand it, except in retrospect, but that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn't really matter whether it was Bush Senior, whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr, whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump. After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, the pretty deep state. That was the end of they told, you know, he explained, this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when when Trump didn't agree, "we figured out ways to trick him."

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